Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Java, HTTPS, and proxy servers

I spent the day at work resolving issues with a web service that didn't we couldn't connect to - our vendor code came back with a vendor-specific exception but no description. Sometime during lunch, we realized that one of our proxy servers somehow messed with the HTTPS transaction. A little experimentation showed that the same message was successful from a web browser and the other two proxies were fine from a little software program I kludged together. We haven't resolved why we couldn't connect through that particular proxy from Java but could from a browser and some other windows applications. Any one else seen this behavior?

(I know it lacks detail - but I probably cannot disclose much in detail. I also don't have any notes. Nor do I have any code... which I definately could not disclose.)

I can say that the code used Sun JSSE and the standard URL connection. My test code just used a standard HTTPS GET and then copied the response to System.out.

1 comment:

Rob said...

Suspiciously, this proxy server had a hardware failure that evening and was taken off-line. Haven't been able to look at it yet to see if the problem persists.